


Voice

by fightingfairywoman



Series: One (bare) Voice [1]
Category: bare: A Pop Opera - Hartmere/Intrabartolo
Genre: Character Development, Coping, Grieving, Homophobia, Miscarriage, Possibly Pre-Slash, Possibly Unrequited Love, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash, Recovery, Self-Acceptance, Self-Discovery, bereavement
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 20:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17087588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightingfairywoman/pseuds/fightingfairywoman
Summary: The only voice that can guide you is your own. In the aftermath of a perfect mess, the graduating class of St. Cecilia's is learning to raise theirs.Takes place after the events of bare: A Pop Opera. Multiple PoV characters, including Peter, Lucas, Ivy and Nadia.





	Voice

**Author's Note:**

> A while ago, I wanted to write this whole huge fic beginning before the events of bare: A Pop Opera and continuing after the end. I only ever seemed to get around to writing outlines, though, and didn't want to publish anything until it had all been neatly tied together into a cohesive whole. But the outlines kept turning into character perspectives rather than detached summaries, and finally I thought, why put off sharing them? So here we go.
> 
> This project is called One (bare) Voice; the stories in it are set before/during/after the play, respectively. This is Voice, and it deals with the aftermath.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amongst other things, Nadia hates that fucking play.

Ivy had learned two things at the ultrasound. Each one was a knife to the heart.

First: there was no heartbeat. She was miscarrying — had miscarried already, technically, and the abortion that had to be scheduled was theologically defined as the removal of a corpse. I was shocked; I had no idea that could happen to someone so young, but Ivy told me, her voice shaking, that it wasn’t that unusual. Lots of girls don’t even realize they were pregnant in the first place; they just skip a couple cycles, don’t pay much attention to the dates, and start to bleed again before they get suspicious.

Second: it wasn’t Jason’s.

We didn't talk about that, though. She had told me, in a small and empty voice, what they’d said at the doctor’s office. This wasn’t slow development; there was no chance of saving it. (Death outside and death inside. No escape for Ivy.) I had my head in my hands, trying to process this, when she elaborated: there  _had_ to be a heartbeat at twelve weeks.

Even before I completed the mental arithmetic, I somehow knew. My head snapped up. She and I shared an endless instant of a look, and I’d swear that she could see the gears click into place, but she didn’t say a word, just watched me fall apart behind the mask I’d built to hear her news.

Twelve weeks before the ultrasound, she hadn’t even plucked up the courage to really flirt with Jason. I’d thrown out acid comments about it in our room and watched her cheeks burn, satisfied that it would never happen. Well — don’t count your chickens, right? I started teasing him him on the way home for spring break, and he kept the mask up pretty well, but he never could hide anything from me. I was so angry with him that I spent the break avoiding him. Instead I sawed away at my long-suffering cello, penning lithe and hateful anthems about petty teenage angst.

Because I knew him. I could read him like a fucking book, and I knew nothing had been going on between them twelve weeks ago. My heart leapt up and ran a goddamn marathon, an avalanche of thoughts and feelings swallowing me up. I knew the catalyst, for him, had been the news from Ivy, but if that turned out to not be such an issue — not that Ivy would have had a great time, sure, but still — what would he have done? If he had waited just a few more days, just long enough to hear the news . . . 

Yeah. Right. And if Juliet had woken up a moment earlier, if Romeo had known her plan, if the poison hadn’t worked — if, if, if . . .

I hate that fucking play.

 

—

 

Peter is destroyed. I saw him after graduation: broken, defeated, small and helpless in his grief. His mother, always so immaculately made up, finally betrayed emotion on her face when he collapsed into her, legs giving out, as if the strength had been ripped from his heart, as if his sobs replaced his pulse. My parents were cold and brittle, still made of icy disapproval and impossible standards, but now stunned into silence by this unspeakable event. They couldn’t even look at Peter. I don’t know how much they knew.

‘But why?’ they asked me, over and over and over again. ‘Why? Why would he to this to us?’

Do this to _us_. I’m reminded of something Ivy told me about the day everything started to fall to pieces: when she told him she was pregnant, the first thing he said (after cussing, obviously) was ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ She didn’t need to tell me how she felt about that. I could hear it in her voice, see it in her face. But I knew my brother, and I didn’t think he’d really meant for _her_ to hear it.

_Why are You doing this to me?_

My parents converse endlessly with the priest, in undertones that sound like dark corners and whispered fears, and Father Flynn maintains his steady sermon voice, though I can see fright flickering on his face underneath it. They want to know if Jason spoke to him. Of course, Father can perhaps imply, but he can’t say.

_Why would He do this to us?_

 

—

 

They haven’t mentioned my college plans — or lack thereof — since they got here, which is a plus. _Well, you got one thing right_ , I tell Jason bitterly, and my heart immediately bursts with shame. Can I speak ill of the dead? Can I be angry at my brother? What kind of sin is it to thank your recently-departed twin for distracting your parents from your own mediocrity? I’d ask Father, but it’s his fault I’m doing it in the first place.

I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help thinking of it like that. If it wasn’t for Father, for the scripture, for the Church, for the Catechism . . . would this have happened? I want to ask God, but He’s never offered me any answers. I’ve tried all my life — nothing. I’d already begun to suspect that He couldn’t hear me, even before I lost my voice.

When I was a kid, I wrote letters to God. I would pray so often that I thought God couldn’t possibly pay attention to it all, so I thought I’d write it down for Him: pages and pages of crayon, then smudgy pencil, then crisp McConnell stationery. I knew by the time that I stopped that God wasn’t supposed to have the flimsy attention span I’d imagined, but that wasn’t why. I stopped because he never wrote me back.

I never stopped praying, though. I couldn’t. I was like a tween with an unrequited crush, pouring endless love and devotion into an uncaring void. I tried to offer the pain of it up to Him, and when that didn’t work either, I upped the ante. Most of the original scars have disappeared now, but I still feel the guilt of them itching all over me. The only way to make it go away is to try again and hope that this time it will work. This time it will finally be enough. God will come to me, tell me that He’s there for me and that He loves me after all, that everything else was a challenge, meant to test my faith.

Yeah. I know that’s not how it works. When I do it, half the time I’m just being selfish, cowardly, trying to escape a painful feeling instead of facing it head-on. Maybe my brother was just following my example.

The thought makes me sick. That's the last thing I need — more acid for my trainwreck of a throat.

 

—

 

What terrifies me now is the possibility that my parents will forget about college and start trying to compensate for Jason by obsessing over me. Not in a productive way, either: they wouldn’t consider that their own behaviour might have ever been a problem, but they’d leap at the chance to declare that their twin children shared some kind of inborn predisposition to mental issues. An embarrassing flaw for them to have spawned, but better than admitting guilt. Much tidier than looking in the mirror. And this isn’t to say that I don’t want to see a therapist — just not one _they’re_ paying for, you know? Some famous New York shrink with three books out on Finding Yourself and her hand in their spacious, well-lined pockets. Or, even worse, a Catholic one: make right with God, and everything will be okay! Like God cares.

What if they actually send me to someone I trust, and I let my guard down and confess my sins? For real this time? And how do I know if I’ve placed my trust well? I trusted that Jason was stronger than me, stronger than anyone I knew, and I was wrong. I trusted that he’d come to me when he needed to. Just like I trusted that Father could help. Just like I trusted the Church when they told me to just keep listening for God when His voice was so conspicuously absent. So who’s to say I can trust someone who’s being paid a king’s ransom by my decidedly untrusted parents?

I decide to re-examine the idea of trust. Rewrite the entry in my mental dictionary, because I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be something that other people get to decide for you, or demand from you. And what does trust even mean, if I’m not allowed to choose who gets mine? So I make a list of the people I’m supposed to trust: Mom. Dad. Doctor Green. Father Flynn. My aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, the stiff-faced, lemon-mouthed judges of what’s Acceptable whose psychic calipers document my every sin. Anyone employed or otherwise approved by any of the above. Any text employed or otherwise approved by any of the above. The Church; the Pope; God; myself.

I make a list of people I actually trust. It starts and ends with my brother.

 

—

 

I go to see Ivy, and my parents don’t comment when I end up staying for a week.

We don’t have much to talk about. She’s quiet and kind of reduced somehow, cut down to the essentials. Sometimes she doesn’t get dressed until I remind her. Her mother wrings her hands in the kitchen and thanks me with cartoonishly wide, shining eyes when she sees her baby girl emerge from the hermitage of her bedroom, sporting mostly-clean clothes and mostly-clean hair, and going obediently to the cupboard to pour herself the bowl of cereal I suggested.

What’s weird is, when I’m reminding Ivy to eat, I don’t think that much about my own appetite. This is the opposite of school: seeing her forget meals from sheer metabolic dumb luck made my stomach rankle with bitter jealousy, demanding to be smothered and then scraped out with a probing finger. In the six days I’ve been here, I’ve never once raided the kitchen in the dead of night; I’ve never found myself burning with shame after doubling, tripling, quadrupling what I intended to be my ‘small snack’; I’ve never spat bile over the porcelain confessional, washing my hands of my transgressions and praying that the toilet doesn’t clog. It’s especially weird because I can still remember vividly how seeing Ivy staying perched on her bed, chattering on her flashy new cellphone instead of heading off when dinnertime rolled around, used to spark self-hatred deep inside me — an inferno-to-be just begging to be stamped out by oral self-abuse. Of course, that never actually stopped it; all it did was stall for me while I did the psychological equivalent of hiding under the bed to escape the monster that lived there.

 

—

 

(I revisit the list of people I actually trust. Next to _my brother_ , I add:  _her?_ )

 

—

 

Technically, Jason didn’t take a lethal overdose. He died because he aspirated his vomit, which we didn’t notice, because we were too busy calling 911 and watching him convulse. In front of Mom and Dad, the doctor said he wouldn’t have felt anything; he’d be too high by the time the side effects set in, but I stuck around, let Mom and Dad slip outside before I blocked the doctor’s exit and demanded the truth.

It took some swearing and some angry crying, but eventually she walked me through it. The dose, the onset, the effects. He would have felt drowsy, dizzy maybe, possibly nauseous, during the first fifteen minutes — the beginning of the show. The show that Must Go On, apparently, because he fought it for what the doctor let slip was a surprisingly long time before he stumbled and collapsed. Peter noticed him slurring his words half a page of dialogue before anybody else, but what could he do? I remembered him sitting there afterwards, all of us in shock as we compared notes, trying to unravel what had happened. His red eyes when he interrupted our consensus about when it had set in. We all fell silent; there was no point contradicting him. He would know.

According to the doctor, he was a fighter. Funny she should say that when what he was fighting was his own decision to give up, but I guess he never could let himself relax, even when he’d made his final choice. Our parents should be proud of that work ethic. I mean, if you’re going to die onstage during a musical theater production with your gay boyfriend, I guess you’d damn well better make it the best show you can up until the last possible minute, right? 

More sarcasm. Defensive mechanism, I guess. 

The doctor told me how the drug would have affected his brain, his respiratory system, his heart. From what she tells me, which is still cushioned in euphemism and avoidance, it sounds like he choked to death in front of us due to our own stupidity. We didn’t put him in the recovery position; if he’d been on his side, he might not have aspirated anything. (And we didn’t help him when he first needed it; if we’d been on his side, he might not have ODed. Always a chain of blame to follow.)

I don’t know if God is listening, or if the Church is right about all of this. I don’t know what I should do or say now. I don’t have faith any more; my voice has been swallowed by the black hole where my brother used to be. All I know is that my brother didn’t have to die.

After some more thought in a less volatile emotional state, my list of People I Trust now includes Peter, although there’s a question mark in parentheses beside his name. I definitely trust him more than I trust anyone else to talk about my brother. After all, apart from me, Peter’s the one who knew Jason best. Peter’s the only person who I know for sure both truly knew and truly loved him, maybe even more than me; as such, we have this kind of bond I can’t really quantify. I don’t even have any words for it, though I’m vaguely tempted by ‘brother’, even if I can’t be sure whether he’d smile at that or give me that _look_ , like I’d just punched him in the face. It’s hard to tell with him.

Maybe I'll tell him anyway.

 


End file.
